Harmony offers $1 million bounty for return of stolen funds

Harmony Protocol, a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain, today tweeted an offer of a $1 million bounty for the return of $100 million in crypto stolen from the hack of its Ethereum-linked Horizon bridge on Thursday, as well for information on how the hack took place.

The company added that it would “advocate for no criminal charges” if the funds were returned.

Harmony Protocol’s founder and CEO, Stephen Tse, also tweeted that there was “no evidence of smart contract code breach. No evidence of any vulnerability on the Horizon platform was found. Our consensus layer of the Harmony blockchain remains secure.”

While the Harmony team is continuing its investigation, security experts on Friday had offered some insights into the hack. According to Mudit Gupta, Polygon's chief information security officer, the perpetrator gained control of a multi-signature wallet used in deploying Harmony's bridge, probably by compromising two private addresses, and drained the funds.

Today, Tse said that his “team has found evidence that private keys were compromised, leading to the breach of our Horizon bridge.”

He added that while the investigation was ongoing, Harmony would “continue taking steps to further harden our operations and infrastructure security.”